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Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Last of my resent photography session, with the same issues of sharpness and color.

Here we have the Sheriff JB and his posse, of Slumpshire, a mutie haven in the hive. Even muties need the law, and while sometimes it comes from without, sometimes it comes from within, and a mutie rises to protect (or rule) his fellows. Such is the case with Sheriff JB, a tragic figure in the mutie community, for he has a staggering intellect, but is far to misshapen to utilize it in standard imperial society. Rather than turn to a life of crime, JB made himself Sheriff to protect his fellows, and "acquired" Blondie and Dogsbody to help him.

Blondie

Custom antique autogun

Dogsbody

Matchlock

Sheriff JB, too disfigured for Imperial service

These poor fellows are created from a variety of bitz, and will serve as minor NPCs in various Inquisitor/Necromunda type settings. Bases, as always, are obviously unfinished. (I should probably just black them in for now)

Monday, August 24, 2015

Back in December, I completed this conversion, and poor little fishman has been rattling around in my paint box for a while unfinished. Well no longer!

As part of last weekend's photography, I managed to get this guy photographed, although again, the colors are off.

Close shot of that frightening visage, and his chemical powered lasgun

I decided that the "lantern" is really a proto-eye, and that it is used to look around corners and such. He carries a few bombs and a couple of reloads for his chemical lasgun. Undecided if he will be a mercenary, or working with the Rogue Trader I have sitting around on the workbench.

Friday, August 21, 2015

Finished photos of the Vigil, a group of figures created to act as NPCs or hired support for Inquisitor games. They are some sort of hired watchmen who act as police in their lower hive community.

Photographed the prior weekend, they have the same problem with the color being off. (here is an older shot with better color)

Team leader, with stun baton, knives, and laspistol

Stun baton created with a chaos marauder axe and a bit of plastic tube

Trooper with webber

built from a marine flamer and the trumpet from a skeleton musician

Scanner trooper

Classic plastic laspistol from some frames I bought when first getting into 40k

Trooper with combat shotgun

Here you can see what a pain it was to get his body to fit this pose, and in reality his shoulder would be dislocated...

All of these figures were created with the contemporary Empire handgunner bodies, and various bitz to create their 40k gear. The troopers all have a head cut from the 6th edition spear men bodies, which I feel gives a good common equipment look to offset the various assortment of weapons.

It is hard to tell in these crappy pictures, but they have dark blue suits with red stripes on the legs, white shoulder pads, and a number of leather items.

Basing still needs to be finalized obviously, but I am still mulling that over.

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

A long while back I had it in my head that I should make a test bit of pavement to try out the idea of using standard wall filler as a pavement/road. The idea was that I would tryout this technique on a scrap of card and examine its suitability for larger terrain pieces.

The process was thus:

Cut a bit of GW plastic sprue to be the curb

slather the "pavement" portion of the board with wall filler

layer of wall filler for the "road"

repeat until all gaps are filled

sand and add in pavement stone markings

"paint" with ink diluted in rubbing alcohol

repeat until desired color is obtained

paint on markings, add trash/plants as needed

add pastel chalks

seal

Here is my blurry result.

In person the "dirt" in the gutter is a bit less reddish, and obviously the actual pavement is not blurry!

Ruddy version of the same, where you can see the curb and detritus

I was particularly pleased with how the sponge painted markings turned out, particularly as they took all of 5 minutes to do. Anyway, it seems as if this pavement test is mostly a success; however it is not as quick as one might hope for, say, doing a whole city block of terrain. Certainly suitable for building a photography set.

Monday, August 17, 2015

First of a series of photos taken this weekend of various finished miniatures.

Converted from a Reaper Bones figure. I added the shield and replaced the head with a standard Chaos Warrior head. I then added the right shoulder pad and sliced off the overly large integral base so that he could go on a more standard slotta. Still needs to have his base finished with some static grass and the like, but I will probably wait until I build up that Chaos battalion I got last year.

I liked painting the Bones material, and it certainly was easy to modify, as a sharp knife sliced away anything unwanted.

Regarding the photography, I used my wife's new camera for this, and as you can see my results were less than stellar. I need to try again sometime soon (now that she is around to coach me) and perhaps I can replace these pictures with something a bit more true to color and sharper.

Friday, August 7, 2015

Which is pretty interesting as Warlords continues to increase its dominance of the "casual" historical miniatures market, and this will also expand their reach into the sci-fi market with the various zombie kits and the shock troops produced by Wargames Factory.

I believe that Warlords also sells the plastic Perry miniatures, and the plastic Gripping Beast miniatures , which means that only Victrix is outside of their store.

So an interesting development.

On a more personal note, not too much time for hobby lately, although I have painted a few figures waiting to be photographed, and worked on my converted Sigmarine. Summer is busy, and the kids were very sick which cut into "free" time significantly.